A counter-intuitive diet works wonders…or does it?

Mark Haub has come up with a diet plan that seems to have been designed by a seven-year-old.

Haub is a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. He recently went on weight-loss diet that strictly limited his calorie intake to 1,800 per day.

But most of those calories came from Twinkies, Doritos, Kellogg’s Corn Pops, brownies, and other similar treats. He also consumed one protein shake per day, some low-calorie vegetables, and a multivitamin.

The results were impressive: He lost nearly 30 pounds in two months. And this is a guy whose previous weight-loss attempts with healthy diets were unsuccessful.

Haub says he wanted to show his students that pure calorie counting is the secret to a successful diet. Consume fewer calories than you burn and you’ll drop the pounds.

Okay, he lost weight, but other health problems sprang up, right?

Wrong.

What’s genuinely bewildering is that Haub’s HDL cholesterol increased by 20 percent, his LDL dropped by the same amount, and his triglycerides dropped even more significantly–by nearly 40 percent!

Haub is shaking his head in wonder at those three developments. He recognizes that the diet should be unhealthy, but as he told CNN, “The data doesn’t say that.”

Okay, so he lost weight, and his heart-health markers all went in the right direction, but he must have felt awful, right?

Wrong.

Haub says the first day was the worst, but after that he began to feel better and better. In fact, his nightly sleep apnea problem was so dramatically reduced that his general quality of life improved.

Maybe it’s time to buy stock in the Hostess Cakes company because I think they’re going to sell a whole lot of Twinkies in the 4th quarter of 2010. Especially if Professor Haub writes a Twinkie Diet book.

Haub limited his diet to 10 weeks, so we can only guess what the long-term results might be. I think they would be disastrous, with a complete reversal of those heart-health numbers and onset of type 2 diabetes.

But I’m only guessing. Maybe Professor Haub has discovered an unlikely but stunning counter-intuitive path to lead us out of the current obesity crisis: The way of the Twinkie.

Well…I’ll believe it when I see it.

Source:
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds” Madison Park, CNN, 11/8/10, cnn.com